Hater Phelps' death long overdue

Sunday

Mar 23, 2014 at 6:00 AMMar 25, 2014 at 5:34 PM

By Dianne Williamson TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

Ding dong.

Not since the spinning house fell squarely on the wicked witch has such unbridled joy greeted the news of someone's death. And it's not just the Friends of Dorothy who rejoice; you don't even have to like gay people to hate this guy.

I refer, of course, to the overdue demise of the Reverend Fred Phelps Sr., that oozing mass of malevolence, the human incarnation of all earthly evil. And that was on a good day.

His family won't reveal the cause of death, but I'm betting his heart finally atrophied into a pea-sized pebble. Or maybe his soul cried uncle and skittered off in horror to the heavenly ether. Whatever the cause, the devil called him home.

Phelps and his gay-hating Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka made a cottage industry of whack-job intolerance. He tested the boundaries of free speech by protesting military funerals and celebrating the deaths of gay men with "AIDS cures fags" signs. He created a skewed version of a God so homophobic it made Phil Robertson look like Pope Francis. He doomed scores of Americans to damnation with glee so unseemly that even the religious right ran screaming.

But Phelps was just a fledging messenger of hate — a nattering novice of noxiousness, so to speak — when I called him up for a chat in 1997. A year later, he would burst on the national scene after his family-based followers protested the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who was beaten to death.

When I interviewed Phelps, he and his odious acolytes were headed to Provincetown. What drew his ire was a town education project intended to promote student tolerance regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation. In Phelps' world view, a policy of inclusiveness was tantamount to teaching kids how to be gay.

"Yes, the fags are worthy of death, and there's no doubt about it," Phelps told me then, in a deep, slow Southern draw. "These filthy sodomites are headed straight to hell, and they would contaminate the whole world with their filth if they could."

Man, he was vile. But at least he was consistent. And this column isn't all about him, because that would be a waste of space. Rather, it's about what Phelps brought out in the rest of us.

In Provincetown, when residents learned that Phelps and his minions were descending on their small seaside community, no one tried to stop him. Instead, all the sinners and their supporters gathered at St. Mary of the Harbor Church and marched quietly down Commercial Street, candles flickering in the light breeze. Not all the marchers were gay; some had come from Brewster and Orleans to help their Cape Cod neighbors celebrate a "peaceful and hate-free" community.

"We believe everyone of good will has a right to live in peace," said Walter Powers of Brewster, who marched with his wife and daughter.

"We abhor the reason we have come together, but the results have been quite wonderful," said P-Town resident Marian Pressler.

That scenario and those sentiments have repeated in countless ways. Just last month, at the University of Missouri, hundreds of students gathered to surround the handful of haters who traveled to campus after football player Michael Sam came out as gay.

By the time of his death, the 84-year-old Phelps had seen American opinion shift in support of gay rights and same-sex marriage. Along the way, his relentless message of intolerance helped galvanize people to stand together in pride on the opposite side.

So thanks for all that, Fred. And if by some miracle you make it to heaven, here's hoping it's one big, endless tea dance.